The Very First Semiaquatic Dinosaur to be Discovered is Larger Than a T. Rex (VIDEO)

Scientists may have just uncovered the very first semiaquatic dinosaur. This massive, Cretaceous-era predator once roamed both the seas and the land, showing that dinosaurs were indeed able to live and hunt in an aquatic environment.

The fossils were first discovered in the Moroccan Sarah along desert cliffs known as the Kem Kem beds. In the distant past, this region was once a large river system, stretching from present-day Morocco to Egypt. It once teemed with aquatic life, including large sharks, crocodile-like cratures and lungfish.

The new dinosaur is named Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. It lived about 95 million years ago and stretched more than nine feet longer than the world's largest Tyrannosaurus rex specimen. It had a variety of aquatic adaptations that included small nostrils that allowed the dinosaur to breathe while its head was partially submerged and pressure receptors that allowed the dinosaur to sense movement in the water.

"In the last two decades, several finds demonstrated that certain dinosaurs gave origins to birds," said Cristiano Dal Sasso, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Spinosaurus represents an equally bizarre evolutionary process, revealing that predatory dinosaurs adapted to a semiaquatic life and invaded river systems in Cretaceous North Africa."

The researchers actually used a digital model to create an anatomically precise, life-size, 3D replica of the dinosaur's skeleton. This allowed them to see that the dinosaur had giant, slanted teeth that interlocked at the front of the snout for catching fish, and a long neck and trunk that shifted the dinosaur's center of mass forward, which made walking on two legs on land nearly impossible but helped with moving through water. They also had particularly dense bones lacking marrow cavities that are usually seen in modern dinosaurs; this particular adaptation probably helped with buoyancy control.

The findings reveal a bit more about this unusual dinosaur which, in turn, reveals a bit more about the period in which it lived and the evolution of dinosaurs as a whole.

The findings are published in the journal Science.

Want to learn more? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.